Database School Building an S3 Competitor with Tigris CEO Ovais Tariq
Nov 6, 2025
Ovais Tariq, co-founder and CEO of Tigris Data and former Uber engineer, shares insights from his vast experience in building hyperscale storage systems. They delve into the intricacies of creating an S3-compatible global object store, discussing Uber's custom hardware designs and the challenges faced during major outages. Ovais highlights Tigris's unique architecture, its focus on AI-driven workloads, and the advantages of its global metadata strategy. He emphasizes the need for specialized storage solutions and the importance of validating ideas before launching.
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Scaling Uber's Petabyte Databases
- Ovais described building Uber's DocStore and running nearly 100 PB of online data at massive scale.
- He recounted moving from stock hardware to custom servers and designing data centers to cut costs and increase density.
The Halloween Cassandra Outage
- Ovais told the Halloween outage story tied to Cassandra's weaknesses like large partitions and materialized views.
- The incident required manual resurrection and executive-level explanations about prevention.
Global Region With Dynamic Data Placement
- Tigris treats the world as one global region and dynamically places data where compute runs for local access.
- Live buckets are materialized views of an append-only log enabling cheap snapshots and forks.